Have you ever seen the life slowly drain away from an engineer when their newly crafted dashboard – weeks in the making – sits untouched in the company portal?
Kevin Costner built a baseball field in an Iowa cornfield and ghost players showed up. Meanwhile, you've built perfect queryable dashboards for Bob over in accounting, but he still prefers his own pivot tables.
The data is cleaner. The insights are clearer. The process is faster. Yet Bob won't budge. Let's talk about how we might fix this.
Our breakthrough came from the most unlikely source: a custom T-shirt. (This story would have been so much better if it was on the back of a vintage baseball jersey.)
During a meeting about a "simple" reporting change, where business stakeholders questioned why it took so long, one of our engineers wore a shirt mapping out all 34 steps needed for that "minor update." Every detail from the data source to the final output was there. The room fell silent as the smiling engineer observed the figurative lightbulb moment above the clients' heads; they finally saw the previously unrecognized complexity.
That T-shirt taught us something powerful: Nothing builds shared understanding faster than making the invisible visible.
That T-shirt taught us something powerful: Nothing builds shared understanding faster than making the invisible visible. While we can spend weeks explaining complex data flows in meetings, watching eyes glaze over, a single visualization can make everything click in an instant.
We put this lesson to the test when COVID hit in early 2020, and suddenly everyone needed real-time dashboards. Not next quarter. Not next month. Now.
Most teams would have assigned this to the next sprint, and hoped something promising emerged in a few weeks. Instead, we got everyone who cared about the data – executives, analysts, and medical staff in the same virtual room. The feedback loop wasn't days or weeks; it was minutes.
"That number doesn't look right."
Fix.
"We need to see trends by department."
Update.
"Can we add shipping estimates?" "Like this, or this?" "Oh, like that! Perfect."
Done.
The dashboard evolved in real-time, with actual stakeholders shaping it. Those same people became its biggest champions, jumping in to explain not just what the dashboard showed, but why they could trust it.
He might not trust a dashboard you built for him, but he'll absolutely trust the hell out of one he helped build.
Remember Bob from accounting? He might not trust a dashboard you built for him, but he'll absolutely trust the hell out of one he helped build. That's the essential truth we keep missing: Trust isn't about the technology – it's about the transparency within the process you go through together.
So next time you're staring at an unused dashboard's analytics, wondering where it all went wrong, ask yourself: Did we build this for our stakeholders or with them? And maybe consider making some T-shirts.
